Keeping it classic at the Rep

In a certain sense, Art Manke, director of the Milwaukee Rep’s Sense and Sensibility, invited himself to Milwaukee.

Of course, artistic director Mark Clements and the rest of the Rep team hired Manke earlier this year. But the director made the first move last spring, when the Rep’s 2012/13 season announcement caught his eye. He saw Sense and Sensibility on the roster, but no director listed. So he made a phone call. Soon enough, he was on board and set to make his Rep debut.

As it turns out, it’s also Manke’s first Sense and Sensibility, although he had previously choreographed a production of Pride and Prejudice in Oregon (the same adaptation as done by the Rep four seasons ago). How has Sense and Sensibility escaped him this long? Manke describes himself as having a “fondness for the classics.” He has a decade-long stint as co-founder and artistic director of L.A.’s acclaimed, classics-focused theater, A Noise Within, on his resume.

He left A Noise Within in 2001 to take freelance work across the country. He hasn’t regretted the decision. “You get to travel around and work with some of the best actors and designers in the country,” Manke said, “all of whom are working to fulfill all my artistic fantasies.”

Here in Milwaukee, those fantasies involve the classic Jane Austen tale of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, sisters whose philosophies of – what else? – sense and sensibility are tested as they pursue romance. Manke said Mark Healy’s adaptation – in its American premiere here in Milwaukee – preserves the “essence” of Austin’s original. It focuses narrowly on the sisters and their opposite outlooks.

Manke said Healy’s adaptation gets the essence of the play, rather than cram in every detail or subplot. Manke is staging the play accordingly. But he’s careful to clarify that the aesthetic is about more than just period-appropriate costumes or a properly Romantic original score. The set, for example, features a vivid green arch and elevated platforms on either end. It’s designed to reflect the late-18^th-century picturesque movement; creeping vines gradually engulf the man-made columns. Yet it’s not just for veracity that Manke has cultivated the appearance. He says the blend of nature and artifice parallels the tension between emotion and rationality present throughout the play.

All that sounds lofty and intellectual, but resist the urge to succumb to what Manke calls the “intimidation factor”: the fear that a classic work is too intellectual or dull for a regular, everyday audience. Modernizing the dialogue, as other adaptations do, is not the answer. According to Manke, using complicated and formal syntax to enchant a potential partner was the classical equivalent of driving around in a new Ferrari, so losing that element defeats the purpose. Instead, he focuses on clarity over simplification and encourages his cast to deliver their lines in a manner that makes them instinctively understandable, even if not every word is perfectly understood.

And then there’s the other end of the spectrum to consider: the Austenites who won’t be able to stop themselves from rushing into the theater to see Manke’s take on Healy’s adaptation. He welcomes them gladly, but with a reminder that this isn’t a by-the-book recreation of the original, either in Healy’s mind or his own.

“I read the novel six months ago and then I put it away,” Manke said. “My job is not to make the novel. I have to be true to the play. … And I think people who have read the book – if anything, they’ll be equally as enchanted and entertained as anyone else.”

The Milwaukee Rep opens Sense and Sensibility Friday, Dec. 14, and the show runs through Jan. 13. Tickets range from $10 to $65 and can be purchased online or at (414) 224-9490.